Complete Works of Swami Vivekananda - Vol-2

Work and its Secret
The Powers of the Mind
Hints on Practical Spirituality
Bhakti or Devotion
Jnana-Yoga
* The Necessity of Religion
* The Real Nature of Man
* Maya and Illusion
* Maya and the Evolution of the Conception of God
* Maya and Freedom
* The Absolute and Manifestation
* God in Everything
* Realisation
* Unity in Diversity
* The Freedom of the Soul
* The Cosmos: The Macrocosm
* The Cosmos: The Microcosm
* Immortality
* The Atman
* The Atman: Its Bondage and Freedom
* The Real and the Apparent Man
Practical Vedanta and other lectures
* Practical Vedanta: Part I
* Practical Vedanta: Part II
* Practical Vedanta: Part III
* Practical Vedanta: Part IV
* The Way to the Realisation of a Universal Religion
* The Ideal of a Universal Religion
* The Open Secret
* The Way to Blessedness
* Yajnavalkya and Maitreyi
* Soul, Nature and God
* Cosmology
* A study of the Sankhya Philosophy
* Sankhya and Vedanta
* The Goal
Reports in American Newspapers
* Note
* Divinity of Man
* Swami Vivekananda on India
* Religious Harmony
* From far off India
* An Evening with our Hindu Cousins
* The Manners and Customs of India
* The Religions of India
* Sects and Doctrines in India
* Less Doctrine and more Bread
* The Religion of Buddha
* All Religions are Good
* The Hindu way of life
* Ideals of Womanhood
* True Buddhism
* India's Gift to the World
* Child Widows of India
* Some Customs of the Hindus

WORK AND ITS SECRET
(Delivered at Los Angeles, California, January 4, 1900)

One of the greatest lessons I have learnt in my life is to pay as much attention
to the means of work as to its end. He was a great man from whom I learnt it,
and his own life was a practical demonstration of this great principle I have
been always learning great lessons from that one principle, and it appears to me
that all the secret of success is there; to pay as much attention to the means
as to the end.

Our great defect in life is that we are so much drawn to the ideal, the goal is
so much more enchanting, so much more alluring, so much bigger in our mental
horizon, that we lose sight of the details altogether.

But whenever failure comes, if we analyse it critically, in ninety-nine per cent
of cases we shall find that it was because we did not pay attention to the
means. Proper attention to the finishing, strengthening, of the means is what we
need. With the means all right, the end must come. We forget that it is the
cause that produces the effect; the effect cannot come by itself; and unless the
causes are exact, proper, and powerful, the effect will not be produced. Once
the ideal is chosen and the means determined, we may almost let go the ideal,
because we are sure it will be there, when the means are perfected. When the
cause is there, there is no more difficulty about the effect, the effect is
bound to come. If we take care of the cause, the effect will take care of
itself. The realization of the ideal is the effect. The means are the cause:
attention to the means, therefore, is the great secret of life. We also read
this in the Gita and learn that we have to work, constantly work with all our
power; to put our whole mind in the work, whatever it be, that we are doing. At
the same time, we must not be attached. That is to say, we must not be drawn
away from the work by anything else; still, we must be able to quit the work
whenever we like.

If we examine our own lives, we find that the greatest cause of sorrow is this:
we take up something, and put our whole energy on it - perhaps it is a failure
and yet we cannot give it up. We know that it is hurting us, that any further
clinging to it is simply bringing misery on us; still, we cannot tear ourselves
away from it. The bee came to sip the honey, but its feet stuck to the honey-pot
and it could not get away. Again and again, we are finding ourselves in that
state. That is the whole secret of existence. Why are we here? We came here to
sip the honey, and we find our hands and feet sticking to it. We are caught,
though we came to catch. We came to enjoy; we are being enjoyed. We came to
rule; we are being ruled. We came to work; we are being worked. All the time, we
find that. And this comes into every detail of our life. We are being worked
upon by other minds, and we are always struggling to work on other minds. We
want to enjoy the pleasures of life; and they eat into our vitals. We want to
get everything from nature, but we find in the long run that nature takes
everything from us - depletes us, and casts us aside.

Had it not been for this, life would have been all sunshine. Never mind! With
all its failures and successes, with all its joys and sorrows, it can be one
succession of sunshine, if only we are not caught.

That is the one cause of misery: we are attached, we are being caught. Therefore
says the Gita: Work constantly; work, but be not attached; be not caught.
Reserve unto yourself the power of detaching yourself from everything, however
beloved, however much the soul might yearn for it, however great the pangs of
misery you feel if you were going to leave it; still, reserve the power of
leaving it whenever you want. The weak have no place here, in this life or in
any other life. Weakness leads to slavery. Weakness leads to all kinds of
misery, physical and mental. Weakness is death. There are hundreds of thousands
of microbes surrounding us, but they cannot harm us unless we become weak, until
the body is ready and predisposed to receive them. There may be a million
microbes of misery, floating about us. Never mind! They dare not approach us,
they have no power to get a hold on us, until the mind is weakened. This is the
great fact: strength is life, weakness is death. Strength is felicity, life
eternal, immortal; weakness is constant strain and misery: weakness is death.

Attachment is the source of all our pleasures now. We are attached to our
friends, to our relatives; we are attached to our intellectual and spiritual
works; we are attached to external objects, so that we get pleasure from them.
What, again, brings misery but this very attachment? We have to detach ourselves
to earn joy. If only we had power to detach ourselves at will, there would not
be any misery. That man alone will be able to get the best of nature, who,
having the power of attaching himself to a thing with all his energy, has also
the power to detach himself when he should do so. The difficulty is that there
must be as much power of attachment as that of detachment. There are men who are
never attracted by anything. They can never love, they are hard-hearted and
apathetic; they escape most of the miseries of life. But the wall never feels
misery, the wall never loves, is never hurt; but it is the wall, after all.
Surely it is better to be attached and caught, than to be a wall. Therefore the
man who never loves, who is hard and stony, escaping most of the miseries of
life, escapes also its joys. We do not want that. That is weakness, that is
death. That soul has not been awakened that never feels weakness, never feels
misery. That is a callous state. We do not want that.

At the same time, we not only want this mighty power of love, this mighty power
of attachment, the power of throwing our whole soul upon a single object, losing
ourselves and letting ourselves be annihilated, as it were, for other souls -
which is the power of the gods - but we want to be higher even than the gods.
The perfect man can put his whole soul upon that one point of love, yet he is
unattached. How comes this? There is another secret to learn.

The beggar is never happy. The beggar only gets a dole with pity and scorn
behind it, at least with the thought behind that the beggar is a low object. He
never really enjoys what he gets.

We are all beggars. Whatever we do, we want a return. We are all traders. We are
traders in life, we are traders in virtue, we are traders in religion. And alas!
we are also traders in love.

If you come to trade, if it is a question of give-and-take, if it is a question
of buy-and-sell, abide by the laws of buying and selling. There is a bad time
and there is a good time; there is a rise and a fall in prices: always you
expect the blow to come. It is like looking at the mirrors Your face is
reflected: you make a grimace - there is one in the mirror; if you laugh, the
mirror laughs. This is buying and selling, giving and taking.

We get caught. How? Not by what we give, but by what we expect. We get misery in
return for our love; not from the fact that we love, but from the fact that we
want love in return. There is no misery where there is no want. Desire, want, is
the father of all misery. Desires are bound by the laws of success and failure.
Desires must bring misery.

The great secret of true success, of true happiness, then, is this: the man who
asks for no return, the perfectly unselfish man, is the most successful. It
seems to be a paradox. Do we not know that every man who is unselfish in life
gets cheated, gets hurt? Apparently, yes. "Christ was unselfish, and yet he was
crucified." True, but we know that his unselfishness is the reason, the cause of
a great victory - the crowning of millions upon millions of lives with the
blessings of true success.

Ask nothing; want nothing in return. Give what you have to give; it will come
back to you - but do not think of that now, it will come back multiplied a
thousandfold - but the attention must not be on that. Yet have the power to
give: give, and there it ends. Learn that the whole of life is giving, that
nature will force you to give. So, give willingly. Sooner or later you will have
to give up. You come into life to accumulate. With clenched hands, you want to
take. But nature puts a hand on your throat and makes your hands open. Whether
you will it or not, you have to give. The moment you say, "I will not", the blow
comes; you are hurt. None is there but will be compelled, in the long run, to
give up everything. And the more one struggles against this law, the more
miserable one feels. It is because we dare not give, because we are not resigned
enough to accede to this grand demand of nature, that we are miserable. The
forest is gone, but we get heat in return. The sun is taking up water from the
ocean, to return it in showers. You are a machine for taking and giving: you
take, in order to give. Ask, therefore, nothing in return; but the more you
give, the more will come to you. The quicker you can empty the air out of this
room, the quicker it will be filled up by the external air; and if you close all
the doors and every aperture, that which is within will remain, but that which
is outside will never come in, and that which is within will stagnate,
degenerate, and become poisoned. A river is continually emptying itself into the
ocean and is continually filling up again. Bar not the exit into the ocean. The
moment you do that, death seizes you.

Be, therefore, not a beggar; be unattached This is the most terrible task of
life! You do not calculate the dangers on the path. Even by intellectually
recognising the difficulties, we really do not know them until we feel them.
From a distance we may get a general view of a park: well, what of that? We feel
and really know it when we are in it. Even if our every attempt is a failure,
and we bleed and are torn asunder, yet, through all this, we have to preserve
our heart - we must assert our Godhead in the midst of all these difficulties.
Nature wants us to react, to return blow for blow, cheating for cheating, lie
for lie, to hit back with all our might. Then it requires a superdivine power
not to hit back, to keep control, to be unattached.

Every day we renew our determination to be unattached. We cast our eyes back and
look at the past objects of our love and attachment, and feel how every one of
them made us miserable. We went down into the depths of despondency because of
our "love"! We found ourselves mere slaves in the hands of others, we were
dragged down and down! And we make a fresh determination: "Henceforth, I will be
master of myself; henceforth, I will have control over myself." But the time
comes, and the same story once more! Again the soul is caught and cannot get
out. The bird is in a net, struggling and fluttering. This is our life.

I know the difficulties. Tremendous they are, and ninety per cent of us become
discouraged and lose heart, and in our turn, often become pessimists and cease
to believe in sincerity, love, and all that is grand and noble. So, we find men
who in the freshness of their lives have been forgiving, kind, simple, and
guileless, become in old age lying masks of men. Their minds are a mass of
intricacy. There may be a good deal of external policy, possibly. They are not
hot-headed, they do not speak, but it would be better for them to do so; their
hearts are dead and, therefore, they do not speak. They do not curse, not become
angry; but it would be better for them to be able to be angry, a thousand times
better, to be able to curse. They cannot. There is death in the heart, for cold
hands have seized upon it, and it can no more act, even to utter a curse, even
to use a harsh word.

All this we have to avoid: therefore I say, we require superdivine power.
Superhuman power is not strong enough. Superdivine strength is the only way, the
one way out. By it alone we can pass through all these intricacies, through
these showers of miseries, unscathed. We may be cut to pieces, torn asunder, yet
our hearts must grow nobler and nobler all the time.

It is very difficult, but we can overcome the difficulty by constant practice.
We must learn that nothing can happen to us, unless we make ourselves
susceptible to it. I have just said, no disease can come to me until the body is
ready; it does not depend alone on the germs, but upon a certain predisposition
which is already in the body. We get only that for which we are fitted. Let us
give up our pride and understand this, that never is misery undeserved. There
never has been a blow undeserved: there never has been an evil for which I did
not pave the way with my own hands. We ought to know that. Analyse yourselves
and you will find that every blow you have received, came to you because you
prepared yourselves for it. You did half, and the external world did the other
half: that is how the blow came. That will sober us down. At the same time, from
this very analysis will come a note of hope, and the note of hope is: "I have no
control of the external world, but that which is in me and nearer unto me, my
own world, is in my control. If the two together are required to make a failure,
if the two together are necessary to give me a blow, I will not contribute the
one which is in my keeping; and how then can the blow come? If I get real
control of myself, the blow will never come."

We are all the time, from our childhood, trying to lay the blame upon something
outside ourselves. We are always standing up to set right other people, and not
ourselves. If we are miserable, we say, "Oh, the world is a devil's world." We
curse others and say, "What infatuated fools!" But why should we be in such a
world, if we really are so good? If this is a devil's world, we must be devils
also; why else should we be here? "Oh, the people of the world are so selfish!"
True enough; but why should we be found in that company, if we be better? Just
think of that.

We only get what we deserve. It is a lie when we say, the world is bad and we
are good. It can never be so. It is a terrible lie we tell ourselves.

This is the first lesson to learn: be determined not to curse anything outside,
not to lay the blame upon any one outside, but be a man, stand up, lay the blame
on yourself. You will find, that is always true. Get hold of yourself.

Is it not a shame that at one moment we talk so much of our manhood, of our
being gods - that we know everything, we can do everything, we are blameless,
spotless, the most unselfish people in the world; and at the next moment a
little stone hurts us, a little anger from a little Jack wounds us - any fool in
the street makes "these gods" miserable! Should this be so if we are such gods?
Is it true that the world is to blame? Could God, who is the purest and the
noblest of souls, be made miserable by any of our tricks? If you are so
unselfish, you are like God. What world can hurt you? You would go through the
seventh hell unscathed, untouched. But the very fact that you complain and want
to lay the blame upon the external world shows that you feel the external world
- the very fact that you feel shows that you are not what you claim to be. You
only make your offence greater by heaping misery upon misery, by imagining that
the external world is hurting you, and crying out, "Oh, this devil's world! This
man hurts me; that man hurts me! " and so forth. It is adding lies to misery.

We are to take care of ourselves - that much we can do - and give up attending
to others for a time. Let us perfect the means; the end will take care of
itself. For the world can be good and pure, only if our lives are good and pure.
It is an effect, and we are the means. Therefore, let us purify ourselves. Let
us make ourselves perfect.